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That's a very fair criticism! My needs are very different as a developer.

To be clear, the offer of assisting with Drupal 7 private message support extends to either Vanilla or Flarum. The goal of my migration tool is to support both.

I use both Drupal and Vanilla and I don't think they are really comparable. Drupal is much bigger and more complex.

I'd suggest that the underlying issue perhaps is that the social media platforms have absorbed much of the demand for forums so that self-hosted forums and blogs are less common. There are still good reasons to host independently but it means reduced activity, although Vanilla has its own business model via cloud hosted forums which is a good thing from the point of view of open source users.

A lot of plugins are now included in the core software.

Tim

1. Personally, I'm planning to migrate to Flarum this year. It finally reached stable in 2021 and has an active open source org.
2. There's no limits in core per se, but because so many things are plugins (like a sensible search solution) you'd need to evaluate whether the quality of what's available in OSS works for you.
3. That matches my impression.
4. I don't believe they offer migration-only service. They only provide migrations at-cost to get you onto the cloud subscription. However, I do know of a developer that does migration-for-hire to Flarum.
5. There are PMs in most forum products. The migration tool ("Vanilla Porter") doesn't currently support bringing private messages from Drupal 7 to Vanilla.

I've forked the Vanilla Porter tool as a new project ("Nitro Porter") that will support additional platforms, like Flarum. I'd be interested in giving you a hand if you want (by adding PM support to Drupal 7).